Energy-Balanced Multi-Hop Routing Protocol among Clusters

In order to reduce the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks and prolong network life cycles,an energy-balanced multi-hop routing protocol among clusters named EBMH is proposed. During cluster head selection,EBMH provides the cluster head election method with a weight coefficient in relation to the residual energy of the node and the average energy of the whole network. It also presents a method of calculating the average energy of the whole network to further reduce data communication between the nodes. This method is based on the exponentially-weighted moving average (EWMA). During data transmission between the cluster head node and the base station,EBMH finds the minimum energy path between the cluster head nodes by applying the typical algorithm for the shortest path,the Dijkstra algorithm,and sets the node energy-distance coefficients as the weight. EBMH transmits the data by multi-hop routing,thus lowering the energy consumption of the transmission. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm can prolong the network lifetime,balance the energy dissipation of all nodes,and effectively lower energy consumption of the network.